Junior Cycle English exam: ‘Balanced and fair'

Irish Times

3 days ago

The first of this year's Junior Cycle exams, English, was a balanced and fair paper, but with some surprises, teachers have said.
Aoife O'Driscoll, junior cycle English teacher at the
TheTuitionCentre.ie
, said that the paper focused on the theme of perception.
'Overall, it struck a good balance between familiarity and challenge,' she said.
'The poetry question asked students to reflect on how two poems gave them a broader understanding of the world. This is a task that many will have practiced, though it's worth noting that the expectation to discuss more than one poem is becoming more common.'
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Kate Barry, a teacher at Loreto Secondary School in Cork and ASTI subject representative for English, said that students and teachers alike were happy with the paper.
However, she said that a question on the moral or lesson an audience may draw from a Shakespearian play may have been tricky for some candidates.
'I would have preferred a more thematic approach, perhaps asking how the playwright ties it all up at the end, as people and life are complicated, and it isn't always easy to draw simple moral lessons from Shakespeare,' Ms Barry said.
Studyclix subject expert Sue O'Sullivan Casey from Pobalscoil Inbhear Scèine, Kenmare, Co. Kerry, agreed that this may have been tricky for some candidates.
'They may have had some difficulty with this terminology,' she said.
'Another curveball was the question asking candidates to write about a short story in class. This is a new style of question for JC English and candidates may not have
prepared for this going into the exam.'
Ms Barry said that the ordinary level paper was 'really lovely, and it gave good opportunities to write.'
There was a lot of content that students would have felt comfortable with, said Ms O'Driscoll, including an unseen piece based on Kensuke's Kingdom, a novel by the author Michael Morpurgo, whose books would be familiar to many students.